46 Percent of Bay Area’s Millennial Residents Want to Leave

Traffic congestion and skyrocketing housing prices have caused approximately 46 percent of the Bay Area’s millennial residents to start looking at potentially exiting the increasingly unlivable region.

The findings were part of a new poll released by the Bay Area Council on Thursday which also showed that 40 percent of Bay Area residents say they want to move away from the area over the next few years. That figure is up by 12 percent from last year’s report from the Bay Area Council which found that 34 percent of residents wanted to exit.

“It turns out that we were wrong about millennial preferences, the stories were wrong that millennials wanted to live in a hyper-urban environment and that it would be OK to raise families in a condo,” Micah Weinberg, president of the Bay Area Council’s Economic Institute, said, according to the East Bay Times. “Millennials are putting off family formation, but when they have a family, they want what their parents had: a house on a nice lot pretty close to work.”

The council reportedly polled 1,000 residents across nine Bay Area counties in late January for its annual survey including Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma, Napa and Solano Counties.

Asked which direction those polled believe the Bay Area is going, the Council found that 42 percent believed it was going down the “wrong track,” an increase of 15 percent since 2014. 

The council also found that most of the people polled, 26 percent, have household incomes greater than $150,000 annually.

Breitbart News previously reported that the housing affordability crisis in the Bay Area has caused many small businesses to lose their employees as workers have been forced to leave the region for more affordable neighborhoods. 

Last year, in neighboring Palo Alto, a tiny 180-square-foot shack was listed for sale at $1.98 million. Around the same time, a 764-square-foot rotting, wooden earthquake shack located close to San Francisco’s Mission district sold for $408,000.

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